A river that forgot its source: place, memory and intergenerational trauma in Northern Finnish community

This article examines how environmental trauma develops and is passed across four generations of women living beside a dammed river in Northern Finland. Through their connected life stories, it traces the emotional, cultural and psychological impacts of hydropower-driven environmental change. Once central to identity and livelihood, the free-flowing river has become a regulated, quiet presence and its silence echoes the community’s muted grief and disrupted memory. Drawing on cultural trauma, ecological grief and land-based violence, the study views unwanted environmental change as an ontological rupture that unsettles place attachment, historical continuity and intergenerational storytelling. Trauma emerges not only through spoken accounts but also through silence, embodied practices and emotional atmospheres. The river’s silence becomes both literal – an altered soundscape – and metaphorical: a gap in memory and an unvoiced legacy of loss. By tracing how this trauma is remembered, repressed and reactivated across generations, the article challenges individual, medicalised views of distress and argues for a collective, place-based understanding of environmental suffering. It ultimately calls for ecological restoration that addresses not only damaged landscapes but also broken narratives and disrupted relationships with place.